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Limp limbs and cold tears stayed piled helplessly in the corner of this godforsaken prison cell, rotting away like Dream’s sanity as the sounds of bubbling lava and the sizzling heat emanating from behind him broke apart all he knew in life. His clock told him it had been three weeks. His mind told him centuries of suffering in pure isolation had left him mourning his past with a certain unrelenting pain tearing apart his chest like someone had a knife and was twisting, twisting, twisting the chambers of his heart around the blade. It hurt like hell, but pain was unfathomable now. Pain was just another part of life, the pure human experience, and he’d lost even that.
Inhuman.
He felt inhuman, choking on the fiery oxygen around him and drowning in the distasteful aftereffect of rotten potatoes fed to him by the Warden. Dream had been called a cruel person, the kind that was so cruel, he surely didn’t have emotions. Perhaps that was true, in a way.
The Warden, however, was cruel because of his emotional capacity. He played on Dream’s fears, on the unhealed wounds of his past, on his sanity. This was some half-assed game of chess for the Warden, and for Dream, he was a player in the game. He’d never known the true formation process of crying obsidian, but now surrounded by the rock that had absorbed every numb tear dripping between the rocky cracks, Dream understood.
He’d tried several times to find a form of company where company arrived in the form of rotten potato dinners and empty parchment papers. Loneliness and a lack of socialization–social manipulation or whatever they’d call it–had made him desperate for the sound of a voice, the sight of life, anything. There was no mirror, but it was easy to guess that any visitors would find him a mess: matted, dirty blonde hair; green eyes tainted red by the hours of sleep lost on the hard rock floor; his failed attempts at bringing a friend into this misery piled in grotesque, crushed hopes in the corner of the cell.
He’d first tried it with a chicken. A chicken, for god’s sake. He ended up with some fleshy lump of meat and feathers. He’d tried it with other animals, too, and they’d all come out the same, just fleshy, inanimate lumps of lost potential. Still, the night after, whenever Dream was asleep, their corpses would disappear just as quickly as they had appeared that day. Then he’d awaken and get back to work. Resurrection was exhaustion. It required pure focus, and as much as he’d tried to zone it out, the constant bubbling of lava and overwhelming heat prevented him from focusing most of the time.
This, he decided, adding another mark to the wall with a small pebble, would be his one-hundred-and-thirteenth attempt at resurrecting a being into a fully animate object. He’d had pure focus when resurrecting outside of the prison to do it, but here? God, not here. So he’d failed more. And he’d grown more.
113.
He took a seat on the floor, spared a glance at the corner where so many unliving flesh lumps had faded into nonexistence, and went to work. The best work, Dream had found after so long, was the work done when he wasn’t thinking about it. He needed to focus, just not on the task at hand. Taking off the mask he so habitually still wore, even while nobody could see him, he settled into his torturous mind, wreaked with pain and loneliness and longing. Resurrection was the only way to get anywhere in life, defeating life itself.
And he was one step away from success.